Meta

Decent pay and nice perks (free delicious food, commute and health benefits, travel in business class...). Nice environment with colleagues and manager. Lots of freedom regarding what to work on and how to carry it out (design, implementation...).

Very big and cool issues to work on, which you wouldn't find anywhere else in the world due to the sheer scale of the company.

The internal career system seems well-intended and fair at first, until you try to follow it.

Very poor work-life balance. I've never worked so much in my entire career, yet it never seems enough to satisfy the criteria to grow internally.

All internal systems are custom-made, and many times they compare poorly to open-source alternatives, especially from a usability and stability perspective. This means you will spend a long time mastering the internal tooling, and all that hard-earned knowledge will be worthless when you leave the company.

Also, because engineers have so much freedom, everyone is constantly reinventing the wheel, increasing the overall complexity of the environment, and thus making changes harder and harder as time goes by.

This is exacerbated by the bonus system, which for many years has encouraged engineers to build and deliver new things rather than fixing existing issues.

All of this combined has led to a monstrous internal ecosystem which is a huge pile of entangled hair, where the simplest of tasks requires careful planning and understanding and will take several days.

Management has lately changed the incentives to encourage fixing and better quality, but it's too little, too late.

You need to take work-life balance more seriously. More work needs to be done on internal systems. The combination of these two can easily lead to burnout.